Today was the best day ever!!! I got to do what they call "Kangaroo care" with Matthew for the first time (which wasn't expected for another few weeks). I was so excited I was bouncing off the walls waiting to do it. Kangaroo care is also known as skin to skin. This all means that I got to old Matthew directly on my chest, having his skin touch mine. Before he had to be bundled up and I was fully clothed, but now I wear my shirt unbuttoned and he lays directly on me. I had to meet with the Physical Therapist to go over a lot of information about how to hold him, what the different stages of alertness there are, how to recognize when he is stressed, etc etc. It was the most incredible feeling in the world to hold my baby on my chest and to smell him. His ear was near my heart so he could hear my heart beat, while he kept suckling on the tube and sticking his tongue out (this is the suckling response he needs to establish before I can start breastfeeding). The entire time I was holding him, he was tolerating it extremely well. He was only on 29% oxygen and his saturation levels were between 92 and 97%. His breathing was regular and his heart rate remained stable. I was telling the nurses that it felt like heaven (or at least as close as I could get to it) :)
Today they bumped up Matthew's feeds to 21 ml's every 3 hours. So far, he has been tolerating it really well. He has even had poops on a regular basis too! They did find a couple of his stools to have blood in them so they ran them off for testing. They are thinking that it might be irritation from all the pooping and from all the enemas he's had, but they need to run tests to make sure its not anything else.
They did another ultrasound of the head today. It looks like the abnormality is slowly resolving. The radiologist really thinks it was a blood clot and that it is going away. The big questions that still remain are about how he got the clot in that part of the brain and will it happen again and why did it happen in the first place. They are going to continue to monitor it and run more tests on his blood for clotting diseases, etc.
He is still on the ventilator and doing well. They are still suctioning him and getting quite a bit of secretions. However, they aren't as thick or yellow as before.
